From the Baltic to the Balkans

Stuart McMillan

Description

Inspired by a life-long passion for travel, Stuart McMillan embarked on a journey of over 2,000km, crossing the continent from the Baltic Sea to the Balkan coast. The book provides personal observations and reflections on a fascinating world hidden for decades behind an Iron Curtain. It gives the reader a glimpse of how the history, culture, years of oppression and brutal wars have shaped these beautiful lands and the people who live there.Starting in Lithuania, a journey weaving through the beautiful and often mysterious Slavic lands all the way to Croatia - taking in Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It includes travelling in a 44-degree heatwave; taking a short-cut via Moscow; experiencing a chaotic sleeper train out of Ukraine; coping with the failure of all air-conditioning and lighting on a long-haul train down to Serbia; learning about the legacy of both Nazi and Communist oppression; and seeing first-hand the scars and re-built splendour of Sarajevo and Mostar following the recent brutal, and often forgotten, Yugoslav wars.As well as recounting the beauty of the countries and cities visited, and reflecting on the years of oppression and wars that shaped the landscapes and cultures, it also captures the emotions of travelling alone for weeks through foreign lands - the freedom to experience so much of countries hidden away from the world for so long; the reliance on internal narrative for company; and the bouts of homesickness that often conflict with the author's love of travel.

Sujets

• Travel writing

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 08 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800466128
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

About the Author

T he author has a life-long passion for travel and an enthusiasm for storytelling. He was inspired to write his debut book in the hope that others will feel as passionately about travel as he does, and would then be motivated to follow their dreams and see more of the world.
Stuart has travelled in South America, South East Asia, Scandinavia and across Western, Central and Eastern Europe, though his favourite destination will always be the Scottish Highlands. In his spare time he tries to hold down a full-time position as a marketing director.
He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Laura and their overindulged ragdoll cat, Hamish.

Copyright © 2021 Stuart McMillan
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1800466 128
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Cover illustration and design by Stephen Liddell
To Laura.
Home is wherever I’m with you.
xx
Contents
INTRODUCTION ONE LITHUANIA The journey begins TWO UKRAINE And a short-cut via Moscow THREE HUNGARY At the crossroads of history FOUR SERBIA Into the Balkans – in the dark FIVE BOSNIA An island at the heart of Europe SIX CROATIA Destination Dubrovnik
EPILOGUE
INTRODUCTION
M any people have asked me ‘what first started your interest in travelling?’
I blame Michael Palin.
Perhaps blame is the wrong word. It is fairer to say that I credit Michael Palin. Credit him with instilling in me a desire to travel, to see the world. Watching his seminal voyage Around the World in 80 Days , made for the BBC in 1989, confirmed an urge in me that had been there since I was a child, that there was a whole world out there – vibrant, beautiful and exciting – and that I wanted to see as much of it as I could.
In actual fact, the seed had been planted many years before. Before I take you through the majesty of travelling from the Baltic down to the Balkans, through lands rich in beauty and history with stories of oppression and glorious rebirths to tell, let me explain where my motivation for such travel came from.
I remember voraciously devouring my dad’s copy of The Sunday Times travel supplement each week, looking mainly at the pictures of faraway and exotic-looking places. Or exotic at least for an eight year-old boy from a small commuter town on the east coast of Scotland. I remember pictures of places like Positano in Italy with its inimitable positioning hanging off a cliff overlooking a shimmering blue sea. To me, these places seemed a world away yet at the same time both enticing and magical. It also felt to me that whenever I found somewhere I liked the look of, or wherever may have piqued my interest, my dad would have been there. To me, he seemed to have travelled everywhere. In fact, as I found out when I was older, he hadn’t travelled that extensively outside Western Europe, and only once to the US – at the time of John F. Kennedy’s funeral – but it appeared to me as an impressionable child as if he’d been everywhere. Formative years.
The other memory I have of this time is of the weekly ritual during dark, wet winters of sitting down with my mum and dad of an early Sunday evening and watching Holiday , the long-running travel review programme with its annoyingly catchy theme tune of ‘Here Comes the Sun’. A bit like the BBC’s film programme with Barry Norman, it followed a somewhat uninspiring sequential numbering system each successive year – though for some reason the film programme will forever in my head be Film ’84 . Now, in the late 1970s, there was no internet. No social media. No low-cost airlines and easy travel. When anyone wanted to plan their summer holiday, and if you were lucky enough to perhaps go abroad, then the main source of information was from programmes such as Holiday (hosted by the affable Cliff Michelmore) and its ITV equivalent Wish You Were Here with the seemingly perma-tanned Judith Chalmers. Each week, perhaps three different locations were selected and the lucky presenters reported back on the standard of hotels, availability of clean drinking water, what there was to do for children and any other number of useful consumer findings for anyone thinking of going on a package holiday to the likes of Benidorm. We would always watch it avidly for whenever there was a review of campsites in France, with my dad scribbling down information about Canvas Holidays and Brittany Ferries and which campsites were the easiest drives from the ferry ports. And indeed, two years running, my first initiation to foreign lands was under canvas in the huge campsites of the Vendée and Western Loire on the Atlantic sea-coast of France, magical places such as La Baule, the endless sands of St Jean de Monts or hidden gems like Piriac or Guérande. Thrilling adventures to an eight year-old, places that stayed with me and helped incubate the desire to see more of the world beyond my immediate shores.
My teenage years had seen school trips to Switzerland and an end-school/pre-university summer in Lanzarote, and for three years running from the age of 16 I’d harboured a yearning to spend my summer interrailing around Europe, the de rigueur holiday experience for people that age in the days before anyone knew what a ‘gap year’ was. But despite spending an entire summer holiday in Carrbridge with my family glued to a copy of a European rail timetable I’d found in the games room of the self-catering complex we were staying in, avidly plotting my itinerary as I envisaged criss-crossing Europe on overnight trains with my ruck-sack to sleep on, it never happened.
Throughout my twenties and early thirties, though I did get to satisfy my travel bug to an extent, it did tend to be more city breaks (Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, etc.) and traditional two-week summer holidays, albeit to superb places like Tuscany, the Neapolitan Riviera (including finally getting to visit Positano) or touring by car around Brittany, Normandy and revisiting my childhood in Western Loire. These were interspersed with a couple of longer-haul trips, once to New England and once to the magnificence of South Africa. So by my mid-thirties, though I had seen many beautiful places and been lucky enough to experience a lot more than many, the number of different countries I’d visited reached a mere twelve.
It wasn’t until into my late thirties that my travel bug really took off in force. Primarily due to my life changing as a consequence of divorce. Finding myself alone, somewhat lost, unsure of what I was supposed to do next. The catalyst was probably my friend Alan. With Alan, it was almost a case of role reversal. During his twenties, he’d been young, free and single and spent a lot of his time heading off on exotic holidays – to Peru, to Vietnam, one weekend, I recall, to climb a mountain in Cameroon. We often joked that I was his unofficial travel adviser as we would regularly discuss where he planned to head off to next, and to an extent I lived his travels vicariously. So when roles reversed, with him happily married and me young (ok, youngish), free and single, it gave me the opportunity I’d yearned for since I was a little boy. He urged me to take this time as a chance to visit the places I’d always wanted to go. Specifically, I remember him saying to me ‘Where’s the one place in the world you’ve always wanted to visit?’ Well, that was South America. So in late 2007, I flew 6,300 miles and ended up 22 hours later sitting with a beer in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, at 1 a.m. local time, in a little courtyard in a small hotel in the district of Miraflores in Lima, capital of Peru. My odyssey had begun.
Over the next few years, my travels took me not only around South America (twice, in fact) but all around South-East Asia, to Australia, to Scandinavia, to Russia, and to many of the places I’d had on a ‘wish-list’ for so long. At last count, my countries ticked off totalled forty-six and I have no plans to stop there.
In many ways, travel was a release for me. It took me away from a life that had gone a little ‘off plan’. It gave me a purpose; gave me back my confidence; challenged me to overcome insecurities and fears. So I wanted to share that, in the hope that others who may feel similarly, that their life was perhaps passing them by, could take some inspiration from my experiences.
So, back to Michael Palin and why I wrote this book.
A few years ago, I watched the latest of his travel journeys, exploring the newly liberated lands of Eastern Europe. One city he visited stuck long in my memory. A city called Lviv in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine. I remember being struck not just by its beauty, but by the fact that this city, so resplendent with its rich history and blend of architectural styles, had been hidden away from the world for over seventy years under the shadow of Communism and the secrecy of the USSR. And now it was free again, relatively accessible, and irresistibly inviting.
So in the summer of 2013, when I was considering my options on where next to travel to, the city of Lviv came back into my head. One of the prime enablers of travel in recent yea